The Lay of the Land: Poetry and Landscape

In this city where the only elevations are office towers and freeway overpasses, and where a cement-lined ditch is called a bayou, it is easy to forget that there are places in the world full of snow-capped things and cold, clear, running things, not to mention dewy, meadowy-type things and gently rolling things.

I recently returned from a vacation out west and I've been thinking about how landscape affects the human psyche, or more specifically about the relationship between landscape and poetry.

There are some poets whose entire ouevres are wedded to specific places. It's impossible for me to think of Robert Frost, for example, without imagining the stony grays of a New England winter. Then there are poets for whom the idea of place is crucial. I'm thinking of James Wright in particular. Whether he is writing about his native Rust Belt or his own craggy inner landscape, a Wright poem always feels very rooted in place to me. I can always see and smell and almost touch his poems. They inhabit a palpable space beyond the page whether that space is named or not. It is not so much a matter of the poems' settings as it is a sort of groundedness which acknowledges our ties to the landscapes through which we walk and the ways they form our vision and our thoughts.

I only said I'd been thinking about the relationship between landscape and poetry. I didn't say I had come up with anything definitive to say about it. If you have any thoughts on the subject, or any other, drop me a note via the comments link. Thanks again for reading.

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